Besides being a target of resident complaints about unhealthy dust from mounds of crushed material stored there, O&G Industries’ concrete recycling operation sits on prime East End commercial property.

The highly visible Seaview Avenue site is near Interstate 95 and the waterfront Steel Point redevelopment, where the massive Bass Pro outdoor retail store opened last fall and a luxury movie theater and hotel are planned.

So, at the urging of then-Mayor Bill Finch’s administration and some business leaders, O&G agreed to move to a West End lot in the shadow of a massive trash-to-energy plant. Who would care?

“O&G agreed to move because they were asked to by the city,” said the Torrington-based company’s attorney, Ray Rizio. He added the proposed location on Howard and Wordin avenues is “very industrial and beat up” and the immediate neighbors are all similarly in light industry.

That was months ago, before ex-Mayor Joe Ganim, in power from 1991 until 2003, ousted Finch and returned to City Hall. Now opposition to O&G has become the latest cause celebre in Bridgeport.

Some West End residents and others in the adjacent South End and Black Rock neighborhoods are up in arms. And a politically savvy Ganim seems, for now, to be taking their side against the move.

“It’s nothing the city could really support until they can show they can be a good and responsible neighbor and corporate citizen in Bridgeport,” said Av Harris, Ganim’s communications chief.

Meanwhile, since Ganim returned to office with the help of East End political operatives, the city has been more aggressive at O&G’s current site. After over two decades of operation, zoning officials determined the company does not have the proper approvals to operate and in April ordered O&G to cease and desist.

Around that time Ganim held a press conference there to criticize the mounds of material.

Rizio appealed to the Zoning Board of Appeals and recently lost. As a result, the Ganim administration saw an opportunity to begin fining the company $100 daily for blight.

“O&G, like any other business, has to follow guidelines and laws and does not have carte blanche wherever they locate to be irresponsible and cause health issues for the neighbors,” Harris said.

“Green” business

Rizio, who supported Ganim’s comeback last year, is fighting the ZBA’s decision in court, which, he said, puts the city’s cease and desist order and blight fines on hold.

O&G purchased its Seaview Avenue property, a combination of another concrete business and a former scrap yard, in the mid-1990s. Responding to an anonymous March 24 complaint, the zoning department determined O&G had never obtained the necessary approvals for the scrap yard, located at 1225 Seaview Avenue.

Rizio maintains that O&G two decades ago was told by the city that it had inherited existing approvals granted the scrap company.

“O&G is basically doing the same thing, but with different material,” Rizio said, adding his client would never simply set up shop without the proper approvals.

While defending his client’s Seaview operation in court — “We’re on pretty strong legal grounds to stay there” — Rizio is simultaneously submitting O&G’s zoning application for the West End.

“To me the best road for O&G to take at this point is consider putting the operation on the West End site in an enclosed building that’s welcoming to the neighborhood,” Timpanelli said. “Frankly a covered building was never part of the (original) conversation.”

Not in Bridgeport

O&G was set to seek zoning permits for Howard Avenue earlier this year, then backed off as residents in that and surrounding neighborhoods began to organize against it with help from zoning attorney Chuck Willinger.

They are worried about health, environmental and aesthetic impacts.

Rizio said the revised plan will store materials in a three-sided, 18-foot high, canopied structure.

“If it was totally enclosed, then maybe we would talk to them,” said Mary Ann Provey, one of the anti-O&G organizers on the West End. “We don’t want to breath this.”

Her husband, Joe, argued even if the Howard Avenue site is next to the trash plant, that does not mean the city could not find more “visionary” uses for the land O&G would take up.

Willinger added O&G does not “have a favorable economic impact on the city in terms of jobs or taxes” — something Rizio quickly disputed.

Rizio said O&G, which since Ganim’s first administration has also had the lucrative job of overseeing school construction projects, pays a total of $450,000 in taxes annually. And $30,000 of that is generated by the Seaview Avenue location, according to the tax collector’s records.

Some O&G critics are speculating about Ganim’s end game and whether he is being so aggressive on the East End only to come up with reasons to support the West End move.

“I share the perhaps incorrect concern that the city might use this (the East End zoning fight) to allow the move as a solution,” Marcia Eckerd wrote on the online “No to O&G” Facebook site.

Timpanelli would like to see Ganim “be more aggressive in suggesting to O&G there is an alternative and it’s an enclosed use.”

Joe Provey insisted the mayor personally told him “a facility like this does not belong in Bridgeport.”